September Massacres
The September Massacres were a series of killings and summary executions of prisoners in Paris that occurred in 1792 from 2 September to 6 September during the French Revolution. Between 1,176 and 1,614 people were killed by sans-culottes, fédérés, and guardsmen, with the support of gendarmes responsible for guarding the tribunals and prisons, the Cordeliers, the Committee of Surveillance of the Commune, and the revolutionary sections of Paris.
With Prussian and royalist armies advancing on Paris, and widespread fear that prisoners in the city would be freed to join them, on 1 September the Legislative Assembly called for volunteers to gather the next day on the Champs de Mars. On 2 September, around 1:00 pm, Minister of Justice Georges Danton delivered a speech in the assembly, stating: "We ask that anyone refusing to give personal service or to furnish arms shall be punished with death. The bell we are about to ring... sounds the charge on the enemies of our country." The massacres began around 2:30 pm in the middle of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and within the first 20 hours more than 1,000 prisoners were killed.
The next morning, the surveillance committees of the commune published a circular that called on provincial patriots to defend Paris by eliminating counter-revolutionaries, and the secretary, Jean-Lambert Tallien, called on other cities to follow suit. The massacres were repeated in a few other French cities; in total 65–75 incidents were reported. The exact number of victims is not known, as over 440 people had uncertain fates, including from 22 to 200 Swiss soldiers. The identity of the perpetrators, called "septembriseurs", is poorly documented, but a large number were Parisian national guards and provincial federates who had remained in the city since their arrival in July. Of those killed, 72% were non-political prisoners including forgers of assignats, common criminals, women, and children, while 17% were Catholic priests.
The minister of the interior, Roland, accused the commune of the atrocities. Charlotte Corday held Jean-Paul Marat responsible, while Madame Roland blamed Danton. Danton was also accused by later French historians Adolphe Thiers, Alphonse de Lamartine, Jules Michelet, Louis Blanc and Edgar Quinet of doing nothing to stop them. According to modern historian Georges Lefebvre, the "collective mentality is a sufficient explanation for the killing". Historian Timothy Tackett deflected specific blame from individuals, stating: "The obsession with a prison conspiracy, the desire for revenge, the fear of the advancing Prussians, the ambiguity over who was in control of a state that had always relied in the past on a centralized monarchy: all had come together in a volatile mixture of anger, fear, and uncertainty."
Background
Brunswick Manifesto
In April 1792 France declared war on the Habsburg monarchy, prompting the War of the First Coalition. In July, an army under the Duke of Brunswick and composed mostly of Prussians joined the Austrian side and invaded France. As the army advanced, Paris went into a state of hysteria, especially after the Duke issued the "Brunswick Manifesto" on 25 July. His avowed aim wasto put an end to the anarchy in the interior of France, to check the attacks upon the throne and the altar, to reestablish the legal power, to restore to the king the security and the liberty of which he is now deprived and to place him in a position to exercise once more the legitimate authority which belongs to him.
The manifesto threatened the French population with instant punishment should it resist the imperial and Prussian armies or the reinstatement of the monarchy. The manifesto was frequently described as unlawful and offensive to national sovereignty. Its authorship was frequently in doubt. Revolutionaries like Jean-Paul Marat and Jacques Hébert preferred to concentrate on the internal enemy. On 3 August Pétion and 47 sections demanded the deposition of the king.
Insurrection of the Paris Commune
On the evening of 9 August 1792, a Jacobin insurrection overthrew the leadership of the Paris municipality, proclaiming a new revolutionary commune headed by transitional authorities. The next day the insurrectionists stormed the Tuileries Palace. King Louis XVI was imprisoned with the royal family, and his authority as king was suspended by the Legislative Assembly. The following day the royalist press was silenced.A provisional executive was named and busied itself with reorganizing or solving questions concerning the police, justice, the army, navy, and paper money, but actual power now rested with the new revolutionary commune, whose strength resided in the mobilized and armed sans-culottes and fédérés, armed volunteers from the provinces that had arrived at the end of July. The 48 sections of Paris were equipped with munitions from the plundered arsenals in the days before the assault.
Supported by a new armed force, the commune dominated the Legislative Assembly and its decisions. The commune pushed through several measures: universal suffrage was adopted, the civilian population was armed, all remnants of noble privileges were abolished and the properties of the émigrés were sold. These events meant a change of direction from the political and constitutional perspective of the Girondists to a more social approach given by the commune as expressed by Pierre-Joseph Cambon: "To reject with more efficacy the defenders of despotism, we have to address the fortunes of the poor, we have to associate the Revolution with this multitude that possesses nothing, we have to convert the people to the cause."
Besides these measures, the commune engaged in a policy of political repression of all suspected counter-revolutionary activities. Beginning on 11 August, every Paris section named surveillance committees for conducting searches and making arrests. It was mostly these decentralized committees, rather than the commune as a whole, which engaged in the repression of August and September 1792. Within a few days each section elected three commissioners to take seats in the insurrectionary commune; one of them was Maximilien Robespierre.
To ensure that there was some appropriate legal process for dealing with suspects accused of political crimes and treason, rather than arbitrary killing by local committees, a revolutionary tribunal, with extraordinary powers to impose the death sentence without any appeal, was installed on 17 August. Robespierre, who had proposed this measure, refused to preside over the tribunal, arguing that the same man ought not to be a denouncer, an accuser, and a judge.
Already, on 15 August, four sections called for all priests and imprisoned suspects to be put to death before the volunteers departed. Robespierre proposed to erect a pyramid on Place Vendôme to remember the victims of 10 August. On 19 August the nonjuring priests were ordered to leave the country within two weeks, which meant before 2 September. In Paris, all monasteries were closed and would soon be in use as hospitals, etc. The remaining religious orders were banned by the law of 15 August. Marat left nothing in doubt when he urged "good citizens to go to the Abbaye, to seize priests, and especially the officers of the Swiss Guards and their accomplices and run a sword through them". From 15 to 25 August, around 500 detentions were registered; some were sent to Orléans. Half the detentions were of nonjuring priests, but even priests who had sworn the required oath were caught in the wave.
Prussian advance and Paris reaction
Around 26 August, news reached Paris that the Prussian army had crossed the French border and occupied Longwy without a battle. Roland proposed that the government should leave Paris, whereas Robespierre suggested in a letter to the sections of the commune that they should defend liberty and equality and maintain their posts, and die if necessary. In the evening, in the presence of 350,000 people, a funeral ceremony was held in the gardens of the Tuileries for those killed while storming the Tuileries.On 28 August, the assembly ordered a curfew for around two days. The city gates were closed; all communication with the country was stopped. At the behest of Justice Minister Danton, 30 commissioners from the sections were ordered to search in every house for weapons, munition, swords, carriages and horses. "They searched every drawer and every cupboard, sounded every panel, lifted every hearthstone, inquired into every correspondence in the capital. As a result of this inquisition, more than 1,000 "suspects" were added to the immense body of political prisoners already confined in the jails and convents of the city."
On 29 August, the Prussians attacked Verdun. When this news arrived it escalated panic in the capital; the situation was highly critical. Throughout August, the Legislative Assembly, which had been greatly diminished as more than half of the deputies had fled since the storming of the Tuileries, had acquiesced to the activities of the commune and its sections. On 30 August, the Girondins Roland and Marguerite-Élie Guadet tried to suppress the influence of the commune, which they accused of exercising unlawful power. The assembly, tired of the pressures, declared the commune illegal and suggested the organization of communal elections and a doubling of the number of seats. However, the assembly canceled the decree the next day at the request of Jacques-Alexis Thuriot. The balance of power was disrupted, and the conflict between the Girondins and the Montagnards would influence the progress of the French Revolution.
On 1 September the prisons were full. The citizens of Paris were told to prepare themselves for the defense of the country and gather immediately upon the sound of the tocsin. Their imminent departure from the capital provoked further concern about the crowded prisons, now full of counter-revolutionary suspects who might threaten a city deprived of so many of its defenders. Marat called for a "new blood-letting", larger than the one on 10 August. Marat and his Committee of Surveillance of the Commune organized the massacres, first voting to round up 4,000 mostly ordinary people, "suspects" of the committee, agreed to kill them in "whole groups," voting down a Marat proposal to murder them by setting them on fire, then finally agreeing to a proposal by Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne to "butcher them". The bulk of the butchers were made up of "Marseilles," "hired assassins" from the prisons of Genoa and Sicily, paid 24 dollars, whose names were listed by "M. Granier de Cassagnac." The rest were murderers and others previously imprisoned for violent crimes released ahead of time from the prisons they would soon be returning to for the massacres.
Earl Gower, the British ambassador reported:
On 1 September the gates of the city were opened on the orders of Pétion, providing an opportunity for suspects to flee the capital. According to Louis-Marie Prudhomme people still profited from the opportunity on 2 September. The Assembly decreed arming the volunteers; a third would stay in Paris and defend the city with pikes, the others were meant for the frontier and the trenches. It further decreed that traitors who refused to participate in the defense or hand over their arms deserved death. The sections, gathered in the town hall, decided to remain in Paris; Marat proposed to have Roland and fellow Girondist Brissot arrested. At around 1:00 pm, Danton delivered a speech in the assembly: "We ask that anyone refusing to give personal service or to furnish arms shall be punished with death." "The bell we are about to ring is not an alarm signal; it sounds the charge on the enemies of our country." After the applause, he continued, "To conquer them we must dare, dare again, always dare, and France is saved." His speech acted as a call for direct action among the citizens, as well as a strike against the external enemy. Madame Roland, Hillary Mantel, Louis Mortimer−Ternaux thought the speech was responsible for inciting the September Massacres. The commune ordered the gates closed, and an alarm gun fired. After the tocsin was rung around 2:00 pm, 50 or 60,000 men enrolled for the defense of the country on the Champs de Mars.
Around 4 pm Madame de Staël, as ambassadress of Sweden who lived in Rue du Bac near Champ de Mars, tried to flee through crowded streets, but her carriage was stopped and the crowd forced her to go to the Paris town hall, where Robespierre presided. Late in the evening, she was conveyed home, escorted by the procurator Louis Pierre Manuel. The next day the secretary-general to the Commune of Paris, Tallien, arrived with a passport and accompanied her to the barrier.